The Lewis Family Has Been Connected to Nashville Politics for Half a Century

As important as I think it is to keep in the front of our minds that a self-avowed Nazi is friends with a candidate for mayor of Franklin, that he’s running a fascist gas station, and that he’s hosting a racist fight club in said gas station’s attic, the fact that he’s a self-proclaimed Nazi might make him seem like a kooky (albeit dangerous) fringe figure in Middle Tennessee.  

So for a moment, let’s ignore Brad Lewis’ racism hobby and talk about the whole family and how they’ve been tied into Nashville politics for better or for worse for half a century. But let me be clear — I’m sure I’m not going to cover everything. A person could write a book on this family and probably still miss shit. But let’s hit some highlights.

Brad’s dad was Jimmy Lewis. You may remember that, after the family gas station made a big deal about how COVID wasn’t a big deal, Jimmy died of COVID. Before that, Jimmy was a real estate guru and an important source of political donations to Democrats. In a 1996 story in The Tennessean, Bill Carey reported that Lewis had fundraising events in the 1980s for Judge Jim Everett, soon-to-be-Gov. Ned Ray McWherter and soon-to-be-Mayor Bill Boner. Phil Bredesen was reportedly even at one of these gatherings. 

In 1990, Jimmy was arrested by the feds for being, as The Tennessean put it, a “gambling kingpin.” Still, when the feds busted Jimmy, they were surprised to find only two dozen gambling machines, when the sense they had of his operation was much larger. Well, turns out that a police officer — a member of the very vice squad that should have been targeting Jimmy, Larry Felts — tipped Lewis off to the raid, because, again, according to a March 4, 1991, story in The Tennessean, “Officer Larry Felts told colleagues he tipped gambler James A. (Jimmy) Lewis to a raid against him because Lewis ‘was his key’ to a promotion.” Councilman-at-the-time Gary Odom told The Tennessean, “I was told that [Mayor Richard] Fulton would sign anything if Jimmy Lewis’s name was on it.” (Fulton, of course, denied this.) But still, according to Felts, he believed that if he kept Lewis happy, Lewis could get him promoted. This included, according to The Tennessean, co-owning several candy machines and a soda machine with Jimmy’s son Bryan, buying property from the family, and letting Bryan and his sister Ginger ride around in his patrol car when he was on duty. Another Metro vice cop and Felts’ partner, Ed Rigsby and his relatives, bought Germantown property from Lewis. Rigby claimed he did not know about Lewis’ gambling activities, and in a February 1991 Tennessean story, it was reported that Rigsby “said he did not think the deal with Lewis was an attempt to buy protection from vice officers who are responsible for enforcing gambling laws.”

But wait! There’s more. Police Lt. William Douglas Johnson lived next door to Lewis, and Johnson’s son worked for B&H Vendors, Lewis’ company. Officer Ronald Doggett also worked for B&H Vendors. And the doozy? “Maj. Carl Dollarhide, who oversees all Metro patrol officers, is dating Ginger Lewis, Jimmy Lewis’ daughter.” Lewis pleaded guilty in January 1991, and though he faced a maximum sentence of eight years in prison and a half-million-dollar fine, he served a month in a halfway house and six months of house arrest. To the best of my knowledge, that covers 1990 to 1991.

In a Sept. 15, 1996, Tennessean story, Bill Carey led with this: “Jimmy Lewis used to be the closest thing Nashville had to Boss Hogg.” To be fair, this is a whole story in a sentence. Kudos to Bill. Carey got a quote from Metro Councilmember Horace Grant saying: “Back when I first ran for council in the 1980s, Jimmy Lewis was one of those people you had to see if you wanted to get anywhere. He was ‘the man.’” At the time of Carey’s story, Lewis was helping his son Bryan get set up in the restaurant business — South Street Bar & Grille and The Boundry. Jimmy was also one of the first property developers on Lower Broad during this time. 

In October 1995, Jimmy’s lifelong friend Judge Everett shot himself near Jimmy’s house. Jimmy found the body. Everett was under investigation for corruption. According to Carey, “One of the things investigators were looking into was Everett’s pattern of awarding lucrative cases to a small circle to [sic] attorneys with whom he had personal relationships, including Bryan Lewis” — Jimmy’s son.

This brings us to August 2000. Kirk Loggins at The Tennessean reported that, as a result of an internal investigation, Police Chief Emmett Turner suspended Carl Dollarhide from duty because of complaints that “Dollarhide, head of the Patrol Division, has told officers under his command to ‘lay off’ businesses associated with some of his friends,” including his now-ex-father-in-law, Jimmy Lewis. I’m going to quote at length from Loggins here: 

Lawyer Kennetha Sawyers, the new civilian head of the Office of Professional Accountability said that the police department’s investigation is based, in part, on a report by WTVF-Channel 5 that Dollarhide intervened to keep Brad Lewis, 27, from being arrested when we was stopped in a roadblock that police staged to look for six escaped state prison inmates on Dec. 27, 1998.

The television station said a young police officer called in a report that he had stopped a man claiming to be Brad Lewis, who was heavily armed and had no driver’s license. WTVF reported that officers saw paper bags of cash, ‘along with what appeared to be betting slips,’ a sawed-off shotgun and two other weapons in the man’s vehicle.

Shortly after a police dispatcher called Brad Lewis’ girlfriend to ask her to bring his driver’s license to the roadblock, WTVF reported, Dollarhide called the dispatcher and said, “I’ll go get him. I know the kid. Hell, I don’t want the kid to get arrested.”

Other police officers reported getting in trouble for ticketing cars near the Lewises’ restaurants. The reporter at NewsChannel 5 who reported on Brad Lewis’ detention and Carl Dollarhide’s actions? Phil Williams.

Brad and Carl both sued Phil. The Scene’s Matt Pulle reported on the fiasco, and get this — Pulle writes: “In fact, Williams claimed on the air (and no one is disputing this) that Brad Lewis threatened to kill him,” and, “Earlier this summer, Jimmy Lewis was calling reporters, including this one, with damaging information about Williams’ wife, Peggy Nance Williams, who, at the time, was serving as the executive director of the state Registry of Election Finance. Williams was later relieved of her position after an arrest on public drunkenness.” Interestingly enough, in the current day, Brad Lewis’ acquaintances are threatening Phil’s life, and internet trolls have been trying to rattle him by bringing up his wife’s struggles with alcohol. No wonder Phil is so calm about all this. He’s heard this song before, and now it’s just second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse. (Because everything the Lewises touch turns to shit, I feel I should disclose that a Scene writer back in 2001 gave a ton of space to a polygraph expert who believed Brad Lewis was innocent of the crimes Dollarhide supposedly got him out of — based on what we now know is basically a secular e-meter, which is very embarrassing for us.) 

Examining the history of white supremacy in Nashville, modern far-right hate groups, and Williamson County as a seat of right-wing politics

In 2004, Jimmy and Brad opened the Lewis Country Store. Then the rest of the 2000s happened. In 2014, Anita Wadhwani (then at The Tennessean) reported that Bryan Lewis may have used his friendship with Judge Casey Moreland to get a client released from jail. That client, David Chase, was in jail for domestic abuse. He got out and attacked his victim again. Wadhwani reports: “Moreland told The Tennessean he and Lewis ‘go way back’ and described a longtime friendship that has included vacations together, such as a trip to Costa Rica last year.” Ah, the good old days, before we knew more about those vacations. Fast-forward to 2017, and Steve Cavendish is reporting on how one of the women who went on one of these trips with Moreland and Lewis ended up dead in an apartment Lewis rented for her. By 2018, Moreland was in prison for trying to cover up a sex scandal in the wake of these vacations.

Oh, but wait. Also during this time — 2016, to be exact — we would come to find out that the Lewis family’s uncanny ability to leave dead bodies in their wake was extending into a third generation. On June 6, Brad and Bryan’s nephew Carl Dollarhide Jr. got shitfaced and drove into another car on Clarksville Pike, killing Stacy Thornton and paralyzing her infant daughter. He received a three-year sentence, but in 2017 he asked to be let out of jail early. According to a Feb. 10, 2017, story in The Tennessean, many prominent people wrote letters asking the judge to show leniency toward Dollarhide, including lawyer Aubrey Harwell (put a pin in that name) and Judge Robert Echols (who, you may recall, wasn’t trying to give money to the racist Kershaw Foundation, but instead to the weird homeschool program run by a Southern secessionist with ties to the Kershaw Foundation that Echols didn’t know about). 

The next day, The Tennessean reported that Stacy Thornton’s family had not been at the hearing. Her aunt, Vickie Hess, told The Tennessean, “It just comes to a point with all of the people he has in his pocket, we kind of figured he would be granted this early release.” 

This reminds me so much of how F. Scott Fitzgerald describes Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby: “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” The Lewises smash and then let other people clean up the mess they’ve made.

Back in September, Steve Cavendish reported on how soon-to-be-Mayor Freddie O’Connell and downtown impresario Steve Smith were able to reach a detente: 

After Smith began running the [O’Connell attack] ads, O’Connell reached out through Smith’s friend Tom Sturdivant several times to meet with the Tootsie’s owner. Following O’Connell’s victory, Smith called attorney Bryan Lewis.

[…]

Lewis, Smith and O’Connell met at Aubrey Harwell’s office on Aug. 16 along with Sturdivant and former planning director Doug Sloan.

Bryan’s out here brokering peace between Steve Smith and the mayor of Nashville, and Brad’s making real estate deals with a Williamson County politician. Same as always in that family. It matters that Brad’s an unrepentant racist. But it also really doesn’t, because it’s just another way for a Lewis to get to be careless, because he won’t ever have to suffer the full consequences for his choices. How can a person who has been wrapped in a protective bubble of family power, who will never be able to fail as fully as he might deserve, ever realize the grave risks others take to hold his same positions? Of course he can have a Nazi fight club in his attic. Who would ever stop him?

Frankly, it makes sense that Brad is a white supremacist. If you look at everything that happened to his family — the shockingly short jail sentences, the friendships with cops that kept them out of trouble, the ability to get pulled over with a car full of money and a gun and no driver’s license and still get to go home the same evening, the suicides of people close to you on your property that are quickly forgotten, the judges who are friendly with you, the mayors who have to take your calls — what else makes sense of it? From where Brad’s sitting, white people, in his experience, do have a different culture than everyone else, and that culture has worked miracles for his family for decades. Him saying he’s a white supremacist is just him publicly throwing his lot in with the people who have repeatedly treated him and his family like they’re special.

It’s evil, but it’s honest. Can you say the same about all the people who’ve enabled him and his family all these years?